
Some cave pearls are the size of baseballs,
larger than any the cavers have ever seen.
the largest cave in the world---and they might
be right. ere are longer caves than Hang Son
Doong---the Mammoth Cave system in Ken-
tucky, with 367 total miles, holds that record.
ere are deeper caves too---Krubera-Voronja,
the "crow's cave," plunges 7,188 feet in the
western Caucasus Mountains of Georgia. But
for giant passages, there are few caves that can
compare. At the time of the Limberts' discovery
of Hang Son Doong, the largest passage was
thought to be Deer Cave in Malaysian Borneo's
Gunung Mulu National Park, which was recently
surveyed at 1.2 miles long, 500 feet wide, and
400 feet tall. But as the explorers would eventu-
ally determine, using precise laser instruments,
Hang Son Doong is more than 2.5 miles long
with a continuous passage as wide as 300 feet
and, in places, over 600 feet high.
"We weren't actually searching for the largest
cave in the world," Deb says. But she's thrilled
that the cave's newfound fame might improve
the lives of local villagers.
A er ve days of hiking, hauling, and crawl-
ing, the expedition is still only halfway into the
cave. Counting all the cavers, scientists, a lm
and photography crew, and porters, we are a
team of more than two dozen, which seems to
have slowed us down. Besides that, the going
gets dangerous as we climb through the break-
down in Watch Out for Dinosaurs: One misstep
on slick boulders could mean a fall of more than
a hundred feet.
When we reach the next skylight, the Garden
of Edam (another cheesy pun), it's even bigger
than the rst, almost as wide as the roof of the
Superdome in New Orleans. Below the opening
is another mountain of breakdown with a jungle
of hundred-foot-tall trees, lianas, and burning
Rare cave pearls, most of them dime-size here, fill dried-out terrace pools near the Garden of Edam in
Hang Son Doong. This unusually large collection of stone spheres formed drip by drip over the centuries
as calcite crystals left behind by water layered themselves around grains of sand, enlarging over time.